


Awaiting Some Return

by Orockthro



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: AU, Deals with the off screen death of a character, Found Families, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He stands in her kitchen looking lost. “I’m looking for my uncle Harold. I think you might know him. I think you married him, actually. Is he here?”</p><p>(Or, Harold is gone, but the world keeps on turning. Will and Grace struggle to find purpose, and are haunted by an unexpected ghost.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to Cortue and Sarcasticsra for the beta work and for putting up with me while I went through no less than six versions of this fic.

 

**October 2011, New York City**

**SEEKING ADMIN…**

 

_“Sylocet, a recent anti-migraine drug, has been pulled from pharmacies across all fifty states.”_

Grace half listens while she sketches by the window. She’s using her little portable emergency radio because the kitchen one is still broken, and she shouldn’t be draining the batteries on it, but it’s hard to get back in the habit of planning ahead. The news is depressing lately, but she listens anyway because if she doesn’t, she’s afraid she’ll forget the outside world exists, that she’ll just fade away. Half of her wants that, but the half that doesn’t turns up the volume.

_“Sylocet’s creator, Virtanen Pharmaceuticals, refused to comment, but the drug may be responsible for up to 20,000 deaths across the country. The drug, which had been approved by the FDA, is now linked with fatal heart attacks and sudden death. If you’ve lost a loved one--”_

She flips it off.

Sometimes when she’s painting by the window, out of the corner of her eye, Grace sees a man in the park that looks like Harold. She never sees his face, just the back of a brown-haired head on a body that is almost the right height. Sideburns that could be angled like his, and glasses that, if she squints, are exactly like she remembers. She dubs him Not Harold, and he’s the reason she sits and draws by the window every day now, not the soft natural light that’s so perfect for painting. She never puts down her brush to run after him, and never says a word about him to anyone else. 

She’s working on the second round of thumbnails for a book deal, a deal that should have been out of her reach. She can’t get into it and she spends an hour tracing over work she’s already sketched.

Two weeks ago her agent called and said, “Grace, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.” She closed her eyes and let Joanna talk it up, even though she didn’t care. Grace doesn’t need the money. Harold left her with more than enough to sustain her mild lifestyle, and he paid for the exorbitant house outright. Even if she decided to paint in precious metals, she’d be all right. But Joanna needed the commission. She’s got three kids and a husband who’s laid off. Besides, it keeps her hands busy, and that’s better than the alternative right now.

“Send me the paperwork,” she said, and now she’s staring at character designs she dislikes for a project that is dull.

“Grace, are you getting out of the house enough? I worry about you.” Eilean calls her once or twice a month to check in. Eilean’s brother died when she was a teenager, and she was the only one of her small circle of friends who didn’t give up on Grace when she started to retreat from the world. But she and her husband moved out of the city in January when he took a job with somewhere big and exciting. She can’t remember where and she doesn’t really care. She’s not actually envious.

She doesn’t tell Eilean that she doesn’t want to leave the house (their house) behind, or that sometimes she still paints by the railing where he first spoke to her (hoping between blinks that he’ll be standing behind her with an ice cream cone) even though she’s past the year mark and she should be starting to move on (but she doesn’t know how). She says, “I’m fine. I promise.” Because that’s the phrase everyone wants to hear.

After Eliean hangs up, the phone rings; a single solitary ring that echoes like a ghost through her kitchen. It’s been doing that lately. There’s never anyone on the other end, just static, and it only ever happens directly after a call. A weird redial in the system; a glitch. It’s become so familiar it’s almost comforting in its predictability. She lets it ring once, picks it up, and hangs up again. 

The next time she’s out, which isn’t for another two days, she buys a pair of birding binoculars and leaves them by the window. When Not Harold finally does turn towards the house he’s just some man with glasses and expensive taste. It’s the first time she cries since she buried him. When she watches Really Not Harold stand up from the park bench, meet a woman, and walk away with her arm-in-arm, she cries so hard she drops the binoculars. They hit the hardwood floor. They’re sturdy, they don’t even get scratched, and she hates them for it. She kicks them, hard, and they skitter across the floor and run into the refrigerator. They don’t break for another three kicks, and it’s amazing how good it feels to finally leave a mark on something.

 

**November 2011, New York City**

**SEEKING ADMIN…**

The phone rings every night at midnight now. It started a few weeks ago, after a particularly bad day. It should worry her, make her nervous, but it doesn’t. The grief group she goes to says apathy is normal, but this isn’t what they mean, and she doesn’t tell them about it. She stares at her little nightstand alarm clock with its glowing red numbers as 11:59 turns to 12:00 and the ring echos through the room. Sometimes she picks it up and pretends it’s Harold, somehow, finding a way to contact her from wherever he is now. Sometimes she picks it up and lets the static wash through her until the little clock flips to 12:01 AM and the call drops and falls asleep with the phone on her pillow.

Sometimes, she talks back to it, even after the click and static end.

“You know, I miss you,” she says to the dead line. “It’s not the same with you gone. It never will be. I’m okay, though. It’s okay. I baked a pie today. Rhubarb, the kind you liked because it reminded you of your childhood home. Did you know I couldn’t eat Rhubarb pie for months? 

And sometimes she says, “I miss you. I miss being able to be in the same room with someone and just exist with them. We wouldn’t talk for hours, we’d just sit at the kitchen table together. I miss that.”

And sometimes she listens to the static, just for that minute, and pretends its Harold breathing next to her.

 

 

 

* 

 

There’s a knock on her door. It’s noon, and no one has knocked on her door in weeks. She doesn’t have a peephole, just the small window, and she peers past the lace with her arms crossed. A young man stands on her steps in a baggy jacket and with a beat up bag over his shoulder. She doesn’t recognize him.

She cracks opens the door and a gust of cold air hits her in the face. “Can I help you?”

He stares at her for a second before trying to look over her shoulder. “Um. Hi.” He fidgets like a kid. He looks like one, too, in his sneakers. “Are you Grace Hendricks? Sorry to bother you. I’m Will. I think you know my uncle. Can I come in?”

It’s stupid. She shouldn’t let him into her house. She doesn’t have mace or a taser or anything that could stop him if he was a thief or worse. But it’s freezing out and he’s in a light jacket, so she opens the door and he blows in and stands there, dripping freezing rain onto her rug, until she offers to take his coat. She hangs it up on the rack next to her own jacket, the peg that used to hold Harold’s coat, and ushers him in.

He stands in her kitchen looking lost. “I’m looking for my uncle Harold. And I think you might know him. I think you married him, actually. Is he here?” And he’s looking over her shoulder again towards the back of the house, towards her bedroom. She takes a deep breath.

“Sit down,” she says, and he drops into her kitchen chair bonelessly. His pant legs drip twin puddles onto her floor.

She sits across from him and folds her hands together. “What makes you think that?” She’s proud; her voice doesn’t shake.

The phone rings. Just the single ring, the ghost ring. It doesn’t just come after calls now. She ignores it but Will tips his head.

“You going to get that?”

It clicks off like she knew it would. “No. You were saying?”

It’s fascinating to watch as he deflates. She hasn’t had anyone sit in her kitchen in a long time. Mostly when she forces herself to be social it’s outside of her home: sketch groups at coffee houses, meetings with her agent downtown. Friends stopped coming to visit when she stopped inviting them back. His shoulders slump and he seems to melt back into the chair, Harold’s chair. Harold liked the view, he said with that sly smile she loved on him. It was the chair that overlooked her painting nook.

“My uncle is missing,” he says quietly. He’s fidgeting with something in his hands. It’s a bottlecap, she thinks. Or maybe a key. It makes him look younger than he is. “I hired a private investigator to help find him and, well, she found a photo of you and Harold. And your address. She said he was planning on marrying you. Did he?” He looks over her shoulder again. “Is he here?” he repeats.

She reaches out and snags his hands, covering them in her own and holding tight. She can feel his pulse racing. He startles but she hangs on anyhow. “No.” She says it firmly. “No. I’m sorry. Harold, my Harold, he died, Will. Last year. He was at the pier on September 26th.”

He freezes and she can feel his hands shake under her own. “Oh.” He takes a breath. “Oh.”

It’s been over a year. It’s progress that she doesn’t know the number of days anymore, though. “Have you been looking for him this whole time?”

“I guess it makes sense that he’s,” he stumbles on the word and settles on, “gone. I mean, what else could have happened. My dad died there too,” he says, and nods towards the window as if the pier is just down the road instead of miles away. His voice is airy with shock and she stands up to put the kettle on. “He shouldn’t have been there.” She knows that sound in his voice; she knows the stages of grief like the back of her hand.

“Your father was Nathan Ingram, wasn’t he?” It clicks as soon as she says it. She saw both of their photos in the paper in the days after, even though she tried to avoid it all, it was impossible. His father’s name was everywhere after the bombing happened. It overshadowed anything about Harold. Harold probably wouldn’t have minded, but it left Grace bitter at the time. 

He nods.

The kettle starts to screech and she pulls it off the burner. She should wait until it’s cooled before pouring it into the mugs, but she doesn’t; she needs something to do with her hands and she’s so sick of waiting for the right moments.

“I hope you like green tea,” she says while putting it in front of him. “It’s all I have.”

“He shouldn’t have been there,” Will repeats.

“I know,” she says. She never did figure out why Harold had been at the pier. There was a lot she didn’t understand, a lot more she still doesn’t.  “But he was.”

They sit and don’t drink their tea for a long time. “So you and Uncle Harold... you were engaged? He never mentioned you.” Will is looking at her like she looks at the world when she’s trying to draw it; trying to capture three dimensional life and figure out how to transmute it into a two dimensional concept.

She takes a careful sip of tea. “Yes. He didn’t talk about his family either. I never knew he had a nephew or that he had anything to do with your family.”

Will shrugs a single shoulder. “He’s... he wasn’t really my uncle. My dad and him were just old friends.” The Ingrams are practically a royal family of New York. She has no idea how Harold could have been a part of them without making it in the papers, but Harold was always so quiet about his past, and she never asked. She doesn’t regret not asking, but she does regret not knowing.

“Sometimes that means more than actual family,” and then they’re both silent for awhile.

“Do you have somewhere to stay?” she finally asks, because she remembers reading something in the paper months back about the Ingram son going off to do volunteer work after his father’s death. She remembers being angry at about it at the time, that other people could move on so easily.

He shrugs. “I never sold my dad’s old place. I can go there, it’s okay.” He hangs his head. “I just. I really thought he’d be here.”

The tea is cold now so it doesn’t sting when it sloshes over the edge of the mug as she stands up abruptly to crouch in front of his chair and hug him. It’s too much contact for strangers like they are, but he’s Harold’s nephew, even if not quite in blood, and that makes him family. He doesn’t hug back for a second, but when he does it’s with the crushing intensity of someone who hasn’t been hugged in a long time.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” she asks.

He lets go after a long second, and he’s breathing shallowly, like he’s trying to stay in control. “Nothing.”

“Visit me again. Tomorrow.”

He runs a hand over his face. “Okay. Okay, sure.”

 

*

 

That night when the phone rings at midnight she picks it up and listens to the static. When it falls silent she says, “I met Will today. He’s a good kid. I wish you’d told me about him. But I guess it’s better late than never.” She falls asleep with the phone tucked under her head.


	2. Chapter Two

**November, 2011, New York City**

**SEEKING ADMIN…**

 

The loft looks just like he left it, with sheets over the furniture and boxes of his dad’s stuff stacked up in corners gathering dust. It was second nature to key in the security code. Growing up, his dad had set the code as the last digits of their old phone number because it was easier for Will to remember. Even when his dad moved out of the house and into the loft, even after the old phone number was long gone, he kept it the same.

He orders a pizza because he doesn’t want to have to fake smile with anyone, and the delivery man comes bearing two. Some sort of error on the computer’s end, but it’s already paid for, so Will just shrugs and makes sure to give the guy a good tip. He could move the boxes off his dad’s dining room table, but he’d have to take the dust covers off the chairs too, so he eats on the floor and uses toilet paper as napkins.

Then, when he’s eaten more than he should have and has the rest wrapped up and stuffed in the empty stainless steel refrigerator, he lays on the sheet-covered sofa by the big window. He doesn’t take the sheet off and he lets his fingers run across the grooves his weight makes against it. He hasn’t been back here since the funeral.

He should have asked Grace about Harold’s funeral. He hates himself for not asking. Most of the people who died in the bombing were buried by their families, but some were part of a mass service, those whose bodies were never recovered. Thirty two people had been killed but only twenty nine had been recovered fully. Some people they had to identify from their teeth because their fingerprints were melted off.

His dad had died almost instantly, they said. Massive head trauma. He was right next to the blast site. Other people had been so badly burned, so mangled, it took them days to die.

He makes it to the toilet before he throws up the pizza and falls asleep in the tub with one of the dust sheets wrapped around him like a shroud.

 

*

 

He calls his mother in the morning after he digs his toothbrush out of his duffle bag and stands in front of his father’s mirror.

She picks up on the second ring. “Will?”

He usually only calls her once a month, on the 15th, and only to ask if there’s been news about Uncle Harold. That’s their deal. It’s the 27th. It’s morning here, which means it’s afternoon in Scotland. She’s in Inverness now, but he’s not sure for how long.

“Hi, mom.”

There’s a rustle in the background over the line and the soft clink of dinnerware. A deep voice, a man’s voice, echos just far enough away from the phone that he can’t make out the words. It’s her not-very-secret boyfriend that she still hasn’t told him about. “He’s dead isn’t he,” she says, and her voice is flat.

“Yeah. Yeah he is.” His throat is thick with it all. “He was at the pier, mom. He was with dad.”

There’s a long silence before she says, “You know, I knew he was dead,” and then another long silence he knows better than to interrupt. “He didn’t pick up when I called about the bombing. He always picked up.” She blows her nose. She hadn’t cried when his dad died. It should bother him that she’s crying now, but he gets it. Harold was always special. Harold being dead, that had been unimaginable. It should have been obvious, though. Harold would never have missed his dad’s funeral.

She clears her throat. “Thank you, Will.” He can imagine her on the other end, sitting somewhere and pulling herself together. She was never one for huge emotional displays. His mom breathes deeply and he can almost hear her shift gears into more habitual territory, safe ground. “Are you going back to finish your residency now?” She’s asked that every call, too.

“No. I have a few things going on here, actually. Thought I might stay a while, see what happens.” He doesn’t tell her about Grace. It’s stupid and childish, but he likes having something that’s just his.

“Really? I thought you hated New York now.”

“I guess it’s not as bad as I thought.”

“I’m going to Argentina next week. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get calls,” his mom says, and she’s back to business as usual. Her voice is clear and the not-secret boyfriend is saying something to her too.

“It’s no problem.” He should say something else, but he doesn’t know what. For a whole year their phone conversations have started and ended with, “Any news of Harold,” and, “No.” Now he doesn’t know what to say instead.

She doesn’t seem to know what to say either. “I’ll talk to you soon, Will.”

“Yeah.”

He hangs up.

*

 

He takes a shower and uses bar soap to wash his hair. He doesn’t want to smell like his dad when he goes to see Grace, and he never threw out the old shampoo. He gets a coffee at a place down the street because his dad’s doesn’t have any beans or any food other than the pizza, and he’s sure if he tries to eat the leftovers he’ll be sick again. Even just thinking about pepperoni now makes him brings up images of seared flesh. He gets a fruit cup and leaves a twenty dollar bill in the coffee house tip jar. It’s his dad’s money anyhow.

He has to call three times before he manages to get through to Grace on the phone on his way in the cab. “Grace? Hello?” The first two times he thought the line connected, but all he got was static.

There’s a pause. “Oh. Oh hi, Will.”

“Is there something wrong with your phone?”

“No, nothing. I just didn’t expect--” she stops. “Are you on your way?”

“Yeah. Is that okay? I can have the guy just take me to the airport again--”

“No. No it’s fine. Please come?” 

 

*

 

Grace makes french toast even though he says he’s eaten and another pot of green tea even though he’s insisted he’s had coffee. The house is beautiful, clean and airy. He’s at her kitchen table again in the same chair he was yesterday, but he had only been looking for Harold before and nothing else stuck in his mind.

“Harold was your family,” she says to him and her eyes flick to the framed photo of her and his uncle that sits on a white painted bookshelf next to her art. It’s small, just a candid shot, but they look happy, genuinely happy. Not a single photo of his parents ever looked like that after 1990. “And, for four years, Harold was my family too.”

“Why was he there, Grace? Why was Harold even at the pier?”

“I don’t know." 

“And why wasn’t he in the papers like--”

She isn’t looking at him. “He went by Harold Eliot with me. So that’s the name they used.”

“Maybe he wasn’t really--”

“Stop,” she says.

He picks at his french toast and waits until she’s finished eating before asking, “Was he...” He can’t get it out.

Grace watches him. Her hair is bright red. He’d missed that before, he doesn’t know how. “Was he killed instantly? No. They pulled him out of the water and he was still alive.” She picks up his plate and puts it in the sink and runs water over it even though there are chunks of toast left on and they’ll get bloated and soggy. “His spinal column was severed and crushed. His brain swelled.”

Will closes his eyes and tries not to see it.

“He was talking, when they pulled him out. He was talking so they thought he was okay.” The water is still running. “But he wasn’t.”

Grace finally shuts the tap off and sits back down at the table. “He died in the triage staging area, in one of the waiting beds. I was stuck in traffic.”

“I was here in New York,” Will hears himself saying. “I was at a bar with some other residents from the hospital. I didn’t even know until my mom called. She never calls like that. I thought she was finally just _calling_. I thought it was about _me_.”

He thinks Grace is staring into space, but she’s not. She’s staring at her phone sitting out on the counter. “I wouldn’t have known either. But I got a text.” She finally turns to look at him. “You need to see him. It will help,” she says, and walks to the entryway where she hung their coats.

It’s a thirty minute taxi ride. Harold’s in a plot in a nice area of a local cemetery, but not filled with rich people like where his dad is buried. The headstones are simple and small, but nice and most are carved in reddish granite and although the ground is frozen, there isn’t much snow yet. They stop in front of a small plaque raised an inch or two above the ground near an oak tree and Grace starts to kneel down.

Will doesn’t get it for a second, even though he’s _right there_. Suddenly he realizes he’s standing on grass that’s six feet above his uncle’s body. That his uncle is down there rotting, that he’s really dead. That he’s been right here in New York all this time, that he died with his dad and no one except Grace ever even knew.  

He drops, and Grace is at his side with her hand wrapped around his knee. The grave marker is pale and blends in too much with the world around it, and ‘Harold Eliot’ is carved out in neat letters. He traces it with his fingers. It’s not centered.

“I left space,” she says when his palm hits the empty area after ‘Eliot.’ “I knew he had another name. I think he was going to tell me, but I figured if I ever found out... we could add that too.” She bites her lip. “I’m sorry it took this long.”

“Wren. It’s Wren. Fuck.” He’s crying, the snot-in-mouth, can’t-breathe sort of crying he hasn’t really experienced since he was a kid. He didn’t cry like this at his dad’s funeral. He teared up, of course. He loved his dad, even though things had been a little tense. But Harold had been the one to make it to his high school graduation because his dad was at a conference in Beijing and his mom was off with Doctors without Borders. Harold was the one who helped him pick which school to go to, who sat down with him and helped him think about his choices, who told him it was okay not to go into tech if he didn’t want to, that he could be whatever he wanted to be.

They stay at the cemetery for an hour. He wishes he brought flowers, but he hadn’t even thought about it. He hadn’t really believed that there’d be a gravestone to leave them on. Grace is crying too, although they’re the calmer tears of a person who knows how to stop, and by the time they share a taxi back to their respective houses, he’s pretty sure she’s as exhausted as he is.

“Thank you,” he says when the taxi pulls up to her street. She gets out and fishes for her wallet but he doesn’t let her pay.  

She smiles sadly. “Come by the house tomorrow. I’d like to learn more about Harold Wren... if you’re staying in town?”

“Yeah. Okay. I’d like to know more about your Harold, too.” He goes to the house the next day, and the day after that too.


	3. Chapter Three

 

**December, 2011, New York City**

**SEEKING ADMIN...**

 

“You know,” she tells the silent phone at 12:01 AM, “I don’t know who you are. As much as I wanted you to be at first, I know you’re not Harold.”

The phone is quiet. Just before she moves to put it on the nightstand there’s a quiet beep on the other end. Then, silence. Grace dreams of waking up.

 

*

Will comes by often, now, and it makes Grace smile every time. Some day he’ll run away, find something important and life changing to throw himself at, but for now, she has him. Today he’s plunked down at her kitchen table in the chair he always sits in, with his laptop open to job search sites. It’s his chair now, not Harold’s old one. She’s glad; she prefers spending time with Will over Harold’s ghost.

“Why do you do them?” He nods at the easel she has out by the window, now full of sketches for a greeting card company’s spring collection. “You don’t need the money, you said.”

She shrugs and dips an acrylic paintbrush into a puddle of yellow. “I have to do something. Everyone has to do something. At least this is something I’m good at, even if the passion isn’t what it was.”

She sneaks a look at him as he rolls his shoulders and clicks deeper into a job search site. They’re still strangers, but not in the ways that matter, and it’s refreshing to be able to spend time with someone who _understands_ , to _help_ someone. Will is still floundering, lost in how to go about his life now that finding Harold isn’t a guiding star. She knows that, understands it deep in her bones. She doesn’t have answers, but she can be here when Harold can’t.

"What do you want to do?"

He shrugs. "Help people, I guess. That's why I was going to be a doctor. But... now it just seems so small, you know?"

"I know. I do." The petal on the page is tiny, one of three dozen that will make up a sunflower. And it will be printed on thousands of folded pieces of paper and sold in thousands of drugstores. "But it does matter. All of it."

Somewhere, in between conversations about oil paints (Will knows all about which color compounds are toxic, and Grace knows which are evocative enough that no one cares) and career choices (Will still wants to please people, Grace knows it can’t be done) Will becomes family. Not family like her mother and her sister, both out in the midwest, and both with only a passing interest in lives outside of their own. Family like Harold was. This might be what having a son is like, and for the first time, she regrets not having children.

“Tell me about him.”

He starts. “Who, my dad or Harold?”

“Either. We can take turns.” They’ve played this game before, but they still learn things.

He closes the laptop and swivels in the kitchen chair to face her, sitting on it backwards and looking very young.

“Well, my dad was a tech tycoon. And Harold was his best friend. They went to college together, but my dad went startup and Uncle Harold went into insurance.”

She fills in another petal of the sunflower in bright yellow. “You can do better than that. My turn. Harold never told me his birthday.”

“Uncle Harold never talked about family other than us.” He swallows. “My dad told me never to ask."

Pretty soon it turns into one-upmanship. “I never knew exactly where he worked. He told me it was a government contract, and I never asked for details. It was confidential.”

“Sometimes, when my dad couldn’t make it to baseball games, Harold would come instead.” He chokes up. “I really thought maybe I hadn’t lost both of them.”

She nods and another pedal gets filled. “He used to disappear for days. Weeks sometimes.”

“Maybe...”

“No, Will. He’s really gone.”

She finishes the painting and lays it flat to dry.

 

*

“I’m going to sell this place,” she tells Will the next day. The words come out of the blue, but she can’t stop them.

“What?”

“It’s too big. It was for Harold and me. He loved big displays, you see, and this house was the biggest display he could find.” He gave it to her fully, too. It had always been in her name with a dedicated bank account to take care of the taxes and maintenance. She thought it was strange, but that was Harold, always three feet left of center and beautiful for it. “I’ll miss it, just like I’ll always miss him, but it’s time to let it go.”

Will’s face collapses; he looks crushed. At first she thinks he’s managed to already get attached to the house, but then she realizes: “Oh. Your father’s loft?”

“I haven’t even gone through his things yet.”

“Do you want help?” When Harold first died her mother had sent the family’s letters of condolences from Iowa, but there was never an offer to fly into the city. She left behind most of her family when she moved decades ago, and she boxed up Harold’s things on her own.

“I... You’re busy. You have your book deal, and--” God he looks young sitting there with google open on his laptop and lighting up his face. He hasn’t submitted any resumes yet, she knows. He’s waiting for the perfect opportunity, the perfect organization or cause to throw himself at so completely that he’ll forget all of this.

“Will--”

“Could you?”

“Of course,” she says, and calls a taxi.

It takes them two afternoons to get through the entryway in the loft, and another afternoon before they hit the master bedroom closet.

“I probably should just have had a service do this. They have those, right? People who come in and just... make it all go away?”

Grace nods from inside Nathan Ingram’s walk in closet. “They do. I didn’t use them either. It just felt so... impersonal." She waits a beat before asking, "Why didn’t your mother help you with this, Will? You said she was in town for the funeral?” Hers hadn’t: Grace was a mature woman in a career her family didn’t approve of, in a city her family didn’t approve of, and in a relationship with a man whom her family had never met,  and she had long come to terms with all of that. Will should have had a support network.

He freezes. He’s sorting boxes that had been stored under the bed. “You hungry? he asks, and unfolds himself from his place on the floor. “I think there’s a good place down the street.”

“Will, wait!” He’s speed walking towards the door, and by the time Grace untangles herself from the closet, he’s gone and the sound of the door clicking shut echoes up the staircase.

Grace returns to the closet. Hung and stacked in neat order are coats and shoes and a dozen boxes with thousand dollar shirts that haven’t even been broken open. There are also two sets of clothes several sizes too small tucked against the far wall. They’re Harold’s size. She lets herself lean into them in them, lets the wool bunch against her face and she inhales. Harold’s smell is gone, though. The clothes just smell like the house. Like Nathan Ingram’s leather shoe polish and mothballs.

It’s another forty minutes before Will comes back. “Don’t do that,” she says, even before he gets up the stairs.

“What?” He’s got huge sacks of food, one in each hand. Chinese, from the smell.

“You’re not the only one who's been left behind, so don’t... don’t do that. Don’t run away like that.”

“I didn’t mean--”

“I know.”

She helps him take the little white take-out boxes and line them up, end to end, on the beautiful marble countertop. When she runs out of boxes to arrange she says, “There are two of Harold’s suits in the closet. They might fit you. Your fathers should all be donated though. They’re too large.”

They don’t talk for another hour. Grace is hot inside and doesn’t eat any of the food.

“Fuck,” she hears from down the hall, followed by a flop of papers hitting the hardwood floors. “Fuck!”

She leaves the drawer of loose change and tie pins open and goes to the hallway. She measures her pace carefully and refuses to rush. “Are you all right?”

There is a pile of photos on the floor, staring face up at them in the hallway in front of the bathroom. They’re photos of her. They’re a few years old now; she remembers that year, the year she had sideswept bangs, the year she and Harold had gotten serious.

Will is pale. “Why does he have these? I mean... why did he have them?” He’s babbling. “Why would anyone have them?”

They’re traffic camera photos, security camera snapshots, pictures half fuzzy with poor resolutions and clunky date stamps slapped in the corners. Harold is in them too. One photo is so achingly familiar she bends down and picks it up. She remembers that night. They’d walked down to the water. It had been their third anniversary, both of them half crazy in love and half feeling too old to be excited about things like that. Harold had bought her roses, and in the photo he has them clutched in his hand, frozen in the moment on the sidewalk just as he sees her coming down the hill.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

Will is throwing himself at the closet, ripping doors open until two more identical, nondescript boxes smack against the floor, spilling out photos like entrails. They’re pictures of people she doesn’t recognize, people smiling, people crying. People being people.

“Jesus,” he says, and she doesn’t understand why until he has a photo of a beautiful young woman in his hands. “Died 9/2/2010’ is scrawled in loopy black sharpie over the bottom half of the picture. “That’s my dad’s handwriting.”

Half the photos have death days marked.

“I’m going to be sick,” he says.

“We don’t know what it means,” she says, but he stumbles out of the hallway and towards the stairs down to the street. “Will!”

“Grace, I have to leave. I’m sorry,” he says, and she hears the door slam behind him.

Grace washes the dishes, puts the empty take-out boxes in the trash and covers up the leftovers for the fridge. Then she sits down on the floor in front of the photos and stares, hard. The last one is dated 9/25/2010. The day before he died.

She looks them up, takes a picture of one of the photos on her phone and drops it into Google. The woman died on the 25th of September in a house fire. It was ruled a homicide and her boyfriend got twenty years for it.

Her phone beeps and she answers it automatically, expecting it to be Will. It’s not. It’s a burst of static and a flat tone.

“Why are you calling me now?” The photos fanned around her are distracting and she can’t pay the static full attention. “I mean, why now at this exact moment and not tonight at midnight like you usually do?”

A beep.

Stuffed behind the photos where Will was kneeling is a light colored page. She keeps the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear and reaches for it. It’s an address, one of a dozen but circled in blue. It looks like a list of properties in foreclosure, all libraries. Will would have seen it, would have picked it up and tucked it behind the photos, away from sight.

“He’s running isn’t he. He thinks there’s going to be something there. He thinks his father is going to be there, just like I used to hope you... that Harold would be in the park.”

A beep.

“You think I should go after him.” She doesn’t wait for the beep. She hangs up and calls a cab.

The address is for a dilapidated library, something out of a horror movie if it weren’t for the early afternoon sunlight. She pushes past the graffiti covered aluminum door and under the scaffolding holding the gothic exterior in place.

“Hello? Will?” There’s a light on at the top of the staircase, and she almost trips on the piles of molting books getting to the banister.

Will is at the top of the stairs, sitting in a small wooden chair and staring at something on what must have once been a study table. A small lamp is on in the corner and she sees one of Harold’s coats hung up on a coat rack. There’s dust on the shoulders and her throat catches.

The thing on the table is a laptop, still plugged in.

“He’s not here, Will.”

Will startles. “Grace? How did you...”

She shrugs. Her phone buzzes in her pocket. “I think we’re not all that different. You don’t get to run away, not like that and not like this. You don’t get to leave me behind.”

Her phone buzzes again.

“You gonna get that?” Will smiles just a little, old humor, because her refusal to answer the ghost calls over the last few weeks has been a strange fascination to him.

But today she says, “Yes,” and flicks the phone unlocked.

“Turn me on,” a text says on her screen.

Grace opens the laptop.

 

**December, 2011, New York City**

**SEEKING ADMIN...**

**...**

**...**

**...**

**ADMIN FOUND.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end... (?)


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